Lilith Saintcrow - Heaven's Spite

This was turning out to be a long goddamn night.

T he Badger called in paramedics, and they treated Vanner for shock in an ambulance. “We kept hearing noises,” she said quietly, watching them. “He just got more and more nervous, then headed in. I had a job to do keeping the rest of them here.”

“You did fine.” I hung up, handed her cell phone back. “Four bodies. I want a full workup on whatever’s left of them. Find out which internal organs are missing. Find out who they are—”

“Already have, at least a bit. Student nurses from Saint Simeon. Pooling their rent, it looks like. Next of kin is going to be a bitch.” She looked like she was sucking on something bitter.

Each one of them was probably a parent’s pride and joy. The funerals were all going to have to be closed-casket. “Shit.” I blew out a long breath between my teeth. “Tell Piper not to release the bodies until I give the okay.”

It wasn’t going to be pleasant for the families. But that was the way it was.

She nodded. Sullivan stood with the blues in a huddle near the gate. The sound of male bullshitting had a high sharp note it doesn’t normally have, and the blues kept glancing at me. Short little nervous glances that skittered off the edge of my consciousness.

Vanner moaned, shapelessly. I looked at the house. A cloud of etheric bruising lingered, intensifying now that I’d unleashed sorcery inside its walls and ripped apart the bodies. One of the regular exorcists was going to have to come out and clean it. Probably Wallace, since Eva was on vacation and Benito was handling part of her caseload. Avery had enough to do keeping up with the police department. “Make sure Jughead gets one of the trauma counselors. And get Wallace out here for cleanup after Forensics is through.”

She nodded, digging out one of the tiny pads of paper she was always carrying. A pen appeared, and she made notes. “Jughead, trauma. No release on bodies. Wallace out for cleanups. His number’s still good?”

“The 3309? Hasn’t changed for eight years.” But the Badger’s thoroughgoing little heart wouldn’t let her take it for granted, and I knew as much. “Have I ever told you how much I love your eye for detail?”

“Don’t let Sully hear you say that. He thinks my body’s the only thing to love me for.” A flash of a grin, but her eyes were dark and grieving. “I tell him the line starts on the left. He thinks I should make exceptions for him.”

“Does your husband know Sullivan’s desperately in love with you?” I played along. It sounds callous, but when you see lives cut short and bodies strewn in pieces, it’s either gallows humor or screaming sobs.

I prefer the humor.

The Badger’s smile did not ease. “Oh, no. Frank would kill him. Then I’d have to break in a whole new partner. And I just got this one housebroken—”

“Are you taking my name in vain again?” Sullivan called. He detached himself from the knot of blues and ambled over. He didn’t look at my chest, where the Talisman was peeping out through its burnt hole. It was glowing, a fierce reddish gleam strong enough to read by if I was in a dark room.

I should calm down. I took a deep breath. It didn’t work.

“Of course not.” The Badger gave him a sweet smile. “Just talking about your bathroom habits. Anything else, Jill?”

“Phone records.” I stared at the house, my eyebrows drawing together. “See if we can piece together their visitors, or an estimated time of death. I’ll need to know what’s missing from the bodies before I—” My mouth shut, jaw clenching for a moment before I focused again. Or what’s not missing. “Have them rape-kitted, too.”

“Jesus.” Sullivan’s lips turned down and he fished out a worn pack of Lucky Strikes.

The Badger was solemn. Jughead moaned again, but quietly. It was anyone’s guess what had scared him more—seeing the decaying corpse up and moving around, or seeing me fighting it with inhuman speed.

I checked the sky, shuffled through everything I wanted to do, and got exactly nowhere. We were wearing toward dawn faster and faster, and all I could do was wait for Hutch to pull the references, wait for the autopsy to tell me what I should be suspecting.

Thrashing around without something more definite would only waste time and resources. Still… “I’ve got to get going. Buzz me when you’ve got something.”

The Badger nodded, waving me away. Sullvan tipped me a salute. Jughead Vanner made a thin muttering noise, and the EMT in the back of the ambulance with him spoke up. “Blood pressure’s fine. You’re going to be okay, kiddo.”

I wished I was that optimistic.

Mikhail’s headstone is on the northern side of Beacon Hill’s lush green, overlooking downtown and the mountains in the distance. The whole valley sprawls out, a vista as familiar as my own face in the mirror. I’d known, as soon as I saw the Talisman in the crushed paper box, that I would eventually end up here.

No use putting it off. And besides, better here than Perry’s nightclub. If I went into the Monde like this, there was no telling what would happen.

I’d stopped at the edge of the barrio for a bottle of Stolichnaya—have I mentioned how loose the liquor laws are on the nightside?—and when I uncapped it the colorless fume could be an excuse for the prickling behind my eyes. I took a long hit and poured him a good healthy shot. It splashed on the granite stone. A faint whisper of traffic in the distance, the lamps along the periphery and at intervals failing to make any dent in the night. Darkness hugged the ground here, hung between the trees in rubbery sheets. The water they dump all over this place every day is a great psychic conductor. Grief and longing roiled under the surface of the neatly clipped grass.

I crouched easily, took another mouthful from the bottle. Swallowed, relished the brief sting. “Hi.” A thin, breathy sound. “It’s me.” As if he wouldn’t know.

Here was one place I still felt young. I knew his ashes were carefully scraped up from the pyre the Weres built him, safe in an alabaster jar in Galina’s vault. But it was here at the gravestone that I felt his presence. I didn’t think he’d be a stickler for tradition and only hang around his ashes. Or maybe it was just that I needed him here, out on a hillside with the whole city spread beneath us and the vast dark sky above. At Galina’s, someone would be trying not to listen. And what could I do, wake her up in the middle of the night every time I wanted to talk to him?

I poured him another shot. The thin sound of the liquid hitting the stone vanished into the breeze, the river inhaling as dawn approached. I let out a long breath, my shoulders slumping a bit. A red gleam touched the puddle, hot and baleful even when reflected.

“So, yeah. I guess you’ve noticed the Eye. Perry dropped it off.” It didn’t sound like much when I said it out loud. But the night tensed around me. I glanced up. All quiet, trees standing watch over the soundly sleeping dead. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Misha.”

I could almost hear him. Bad feeling every day on this job, milaya. Is part of contract.

Well, yeah, I knew that. Jeez. What would he really say to me?

It’s one of the hardest things to get used to. No matter how well you know someone, when they die you will never know exactly what they’d say. Especially if you loved them.

Especially if you still love them, deep in that room in your heart where you keep the only things that truly matter. The baggage you take to your own personal desert island, the exile called life all of us are born into.

The Church holds it as a point of doctrine that hunters don’t go to Heaven. Mikhail had been nominally Eastern Orthodox, with a few significant exceptions. I go to Valhalla, he had told me more than once. Where the fight is the play, like movie.